[airgapstopgap]

The most important of Singer's writings, in my opinion, is "Secrecy in Consequentialism"[0], mentioned in this podcast too, though not the crucial part, which I will present without further comment except that this paper should make any utterance from Singer or any of his followers (for example, SBF) inherently untrustworthy.

> There are acts which are right only if no one – or virtually no one – will get to know about them. The rightness of an act, in other words, may depend on its secrecy. This can have implications for how often, and in what circumstances, such an act may be done.

> Some people know better, or can learn better, than others what it is right to do in certain circumstances.

> There are at least two different sets of instruction, or moral codes, suitable for the different categories of people. This raises the question whether there are also different standards by which we should judge what people do.

> Though the consequentialist believes that acts are right only if they have consequences at least as good as anything else the agent could have done, the consequentialist may need to discourage others from embracing consequentialism. …

> The idea that it is better if some moral views are not widely known was not invented by Sidgwick. In Plato’s Republic, Socrates proposes that ordinary people be brought up to believe that everyone is born ‘from the earth’ into one of three classes, gold, silver or bronze, and living justly consists in doing what is in their nature. Only the philosopher-rulers will know that this is really a myth, a ‘noble lie’. …

> Esoteric morality is a necessary part of a consequentialist theory, and all of the points above can be defended. …

> One of the most common objections to consequentialism is based on a hypothetical situation in which a surgeon has to do a delicate brain operation on a patient who happens to be the ideal organ donor for four other patients in the hospital, each of whom will die shortly unless they receive, respectively, a heart, a liver, and – for two of them – a kidney. The doctor is highly skilled, and is confident of her ability to carry out the brain surgery successfully. If she does, her patient will lead a more or less normal life.

> But because the operation is a delicate one, no one could blame her, or have any reason to suspect anything, if the patient were to die on the operating table. Moreover, the hospital is experienced in organ transplantation, and the surgeon knows that if the patient were to die, the recipients of the patient’s organs would soon be able to go home and lead a more or less normal life. The surgeon knows no other details about her patient or the other patients, such as whether they are married, have children, or are about to discover a cure for cancer. In these circumstances, critics of consequentialism say, the consequentialist must think that the doctor ought to kill her patient, since in that way four lives will be saved, and only one lost, and this must be better than four dying and only one being saved. But, so the objection runs, it is obviously morally wrong for the surgeon to kill her patient, and any moral theory that says the contrary must be rejected.

> We agree that the consequentialist must accept that, in these circumstances, the right thing for the surgeon to do would be to kill the one to save the four, but we do not agree that this means that consequentialism should be rejected. We think, on the contrary, that the appearance of unacceptability here comes from the fact that this is one of those rare cases in which the action is right only if perfect secrecy can be expected. Moreover, it is not an action that should be recommended to others.

0. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1467-9329....

[philosopher1234]

I thought this was interesting and it didn't make me distrust him at all. I can't really tell why it should.

[giraffe_lady]

It's literally just the trolley problem, which is valuable and interesting only so far as it shows the limits and practical undecidability of thought experiments like this.

Which, morally sophisticated people inevitably find is almost comically sensitive to details of the scenario or context, and that's it's virtually impossible to find a satisfying generalizable solution. And then singer is just like "no. u simply pull the lever." It's not interesting.

[suoduandao2]

Well, I think his position is more, "u simply pull the lever if you're sure you won't get caught", which logically might require telling other people you wouldn't pull the lever. So in that sense, one can speculate all kinds of things that he would do without telling others. I suspect his idea of proper obfuscation is more in a sense of double meanings - philosophers love those, and I think it was the basis of the 'noble lie' cited upthread.

[philosopher1234]

It was interesting, sorry

[dale_glass]

A simple answer to such thought experiments is that actual consequentialism has to operate in the real world, not on carefully constructed hypotheticals.

So for instance, in the real world you can't guarantee you will get away with it. Real surgeons operate in teams, not alone, and are surrounded by other well trained professionals. Real people have loved ones that may press for an investigation of what happened, especially if the patient's death was suspiciously convenient.

So now the real calculus is more complicated. Your calculus isn't nearly as simple as "1 patient vs 4 recipients". You could get caught. The organs might be unusable. The transplant might get rejected. Investigations may result in enormous negative consequences. Etc.

[specialist]

That's just another version of The Trolley Problem. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem

If you were the conductor, what choice would you make?

[comice]

just going from your own quotes here, he describes the cases in which one might "apparently unacceptably" as "rare", and the example he gives has lots of conditions. and he believes you could never recommend the action to others.

so I don't think "any utterance" of his or his followers is inherently untrustworthy no.

[airgapstopgap]

This is comically naive and literal. Have you read any moral philosophy before?

The point of his argument is not that under certain exceptional conditions surgeons should kill people to harvest their organs to save more lives, but precisely that any sort of formal pledge or personal obligation or non-utilitarian moral code can be betrayed if that leads to higher expected utility; and that it is prudent to lie about your true intentions and convictions if you think that is a precondition to achieving greater total utility. It is very much an argument in favor of a fundamentally untrustworthy and conspiratorial mindset, and not just specifically on the issue of saving lives – like the trolley problem, this is only an illustration. This applies to utility in general, and thus to all instrumental preconditions for creating it: to money, power, anything; therefore, any act of a Singerian should be suspected as part of an instrumentally useful scheme to secure a position to achieve more utility. This applies the most to pretenses of having integrity, valuing promises or even some kind of sentimental loyalty.

People who profess to believe in Singerian doctrine can not be trusted to mean what they are saying, because you cannot know what sort of a convoluted scheme to maximize total utility they have imagined that could necessitate deception in a particular case.

Again, his follower Sam Bankman-Fried has demonstrated this very clearly by defrauding his clients and appropriating money for the purposes of Effective Altruism and AI Alignment movements, and then by piling an absurd lie on an absurd lie. Singer defends the teaching by claiming, contrary to his somewhat more sophisticated argument, that "honesty is the best policy"[0]. This is what he, in his article, describes as morality for children – that is, the immature people who cannot be trusted to make consequentialist decisions and should be taught deontology.

> and he believes you could never recommend the action to others

Oh. Okay, so he says that it is the morally correct course of action logically following from moral philosophy he has been advancing and propagandizing all his life, but [generic] you should not recommend it to others. How is that very claim not such a recommendation? What is the meaning of this sophistry?

Perhaps it serves to separate those who can practice the shallowest Straussian reading from those who are effectively children.

0. https://www.theguardian.com/education/2022/dec/24/giving-goo...

[sprucevoid]

> It is very much an argument in favor of a fundamentally untrustworthy and conspiratorial mindset

That's a misreading of the paper and a misrepresentation of the position that Singer holds. It is also a misrepresentation of what utilitarians more generally think about practical ethics and the virtue of truth-telling. The following text is in my experience fairly representative of the views held by real world utilitarian philosophers: https://www.utilitarianism.net/guest-essays/virtues-for-real...

[airgapstopgap]

> That's a misreading of the paper and a misrepresentation of the position that Singer holds

It's not. However, utilitarians are inevitably compelled to argue that it is, because their efficacy depends on it. This amounts to gaslighting about plainly obvious positions they have committed to paper, which is an act of violence in and of itself.

> While it may seem that utilitarians should engage in norm-breaking instrumental harm, a closer analysis reveals that it often carries large costs. It would lead to people taking precautions to safeguard against these kinds of harms, which would be costly for society. And it could harm utilitarians’ reputation, 33 which in turn could impair their ability to do good.

Your link proposes a number of contingent reasons for utilitarians to not act like defect bots. It does not bite the bullet on cases where defection is clearly optimal, and those cases are plentiful. This is cheap and disingenuous rhetoric. His paper's very clear implication is that killing the patient is valid move if perfect secrecy can be ensured; so strategic arguments about reputation are irrelevant. Most importantly, this ethos breaks down in non-iterated games, e.g. if Utilitarians do build their God AI to subjugate the world and remake according to their moral code, as many in the rationalist community now intend to do.

> We have a proof of concept in the effective altruism community, which does collaborate relatively well.

Again, EA does very well on processing SBF's loot into anti-AI propaganda and funding for "AI safety" labs, but that's still a defection against broader society.

[sprucevoid]

I quoted you claiming "It is very much an argument in favor of a fundamentally untrustworthy and conspiratorial mindset".

Nothing in your reply now, nor in any of your other comments, supports that claim. Your claim does not follow from the fact that in rare, exceptional cases rule-breaking, perhaps in secret, is what an agent has most reason to do according to act utilitarianism, a well-known feature of the view. The act utilitarian reasons to be honest, not defect and so on are on philosophical reflection instrumental to the core utilitarian goal but such virtues, once habitualized, are nonetheless real features of the utilitarian person's psychology just like in other people.

Do you possess any empirical evidence showing that real world utilitarian adherents are less upholding of everyday norms against lying, stealing, and so on? In my experience real world utilitarians (I've known a bunch of them so far in life) tend to be overrepresented in working for or donating to effective charities or organizations that work to eradicate global health problems, poverty and factory farming and at the same time no less conscientious with regard to common sense norms about honesty, keeping your word, not stealing and so on.

You haven't described what alternative moral view you yourself adhere to. Does it have an absolute prohibition against secret rule-breaking? If the only way to prevent the end of the world and the death of everyone would be to secretly break some everyday rule once then you'd think your obligation in the case is to let the world end? If not then we have identified a case where your own moral view promotes secret rule-breaking. Would that warrant saying that your own view obligates you to have a "fundamentally untrustworthy and conspiratorial mindset"? If not, why not?

[comice]

The rational thing for a secret rule-breaker to do would be to publicly argue against secret rule-breaking at any realistic opportunity. So the more airgapstopgap argues against it the more fundamentally untrustworthy we should assume they are.

[airgapstopgap]

> Nothing in your reply now, nor in any of your other comments, supports that claim

Singer's insistence that a utilitarian doctor is morally bound to kill a patient to save others is sufficient.

> Your claim does not follow from the fact that in rare, exceptional cases rule-breaking, perhaps in secret

No perhaps about it, secrecy is part that can only really be discarded in non-iterated settings, in the endgame.

> but such virtues, once habitualized

Of course you know that "habit", contextualized in the moral framework where habitual action is merely instrumental too, is a categorically weaker insurance against rule-breaking than habit plus belief in the principle according to which those habitual decisions are correct generally.

> Do you possess any empirical evidence showing that real world utilitarian adherents are less upholding of everyday norms against lying, stealing, and so on?

Yes, for example the effective altruism movement is comprised of generic totalitarian scum, which is well reflected in their consensus position on AI safety. I notice you flinching from the example of SBF and his little club of Singerians too.

The problem of utilitarianism, however, lies precisely on the margins. It is rational for utilitarians to build up reputation and influence with charities and such nonsense, to then expend it on a massive power-grab. SBF's only fault is that he moved to early, isn't it?

> You haven't described what alternative moral view you yourself adhere to.

Intuitive deontology.

> If the only way to prevent the end of the world and the death of everyone would be to secretly break some everyday rule once

Jaywalking isn't what the "pivotal act" theory entails, and your theory about total death is specious and motivated by the political benefits of such an act.

Moreover, if [you believed that] the only way to prevent the eternal suffering of everyone would be to secretly work towards the extinction of humanity, would you not work on it? A consistent utilitarian would.

> Would that warrant saying that your own view obligates you to have a "fundamentally untrustworthy and conspiratorial mindset"? If not, why not?

Normal people (ie not effective altruists/utilitarians) have ad hoc "decision theories". I am not an exception. Existence of a world is good qualitatively, not as an ultimate expression of the Singerian principle. I believe that lying is wrong qualitatively too, so for me, the logic of habitually being honest applies in the way it cannot apply to a utilitarian, even if you can design a hypothetical where I would have to agree that lying is justified. A world of utilitarians is not a morally good world; a surgeon should commit to losing more lives than otherwise possible in that scenario, because it would not befit a surgeon to kill patients; utilitarian calculations are invalid, so I do not engage in them.

In more contingent terms: habitual, as you put it, utilitarian reasoning leads to justification of your preferred policies via nonsense utility estimates. Proclaim "vulnerable world hypothesis", now anything you'd want is justified by saving the world, and you get to ape the respectable adult too.

It's risible.

[comice]

> Have you read any moral philosophy before?

yes a fair bit, thanks for showing an interest in me!

> Again, his follower Sam Bankman-Fried has demonstrated this very clearly

I think it's much clearer that Bankman-Fried had absolutely no expectation that his rule-breaking would meet Singers requirements and, you know, he was just lying for the many normal reasons people lie.

> People who profess to believe in Singerian doctrine can not be trusted to mean what they are saying

in which case, nobody who believes in (this) Singerian doctrine should reveal that they do so.

Anyone telling you they follow this doctrine severely compromises their ability to actually execute on it. The rational thing for a Singerian secrecy advocate to do would be to publicly attack the doctrine, as you are doing.